Ella Jeffers ‘25 didn’t think she would make it to Germany.
“We needed to raise 20,000 dollars,” Jeffers said. “I was biting my nails, being like, ‘Are we really gonna make 20,000 off bake sales?’ But we did.”
Last year’s trip to Germany, led by Dan Gavin, was the first in a new wave of Year End Studies (YES) program trips abroad, after a pause in trips caused by the pandemic. This year the roster includes trips to Spain, France and England.
Spanish teacher Shalom Zeigfinger is excited to show students the city of Almeria in Spain. Zeigfinger has a second home there (built into a cave) and he has arranged for local high school students to show them around the town.
“[These trips] bring the language alive. If you study a language in a classroom, you can be into it, but really you want to learn a language for what you can use it to access,” Zeigfinger said. “You can see art and understand art, or talk about art with somebody else, and see their perspective on it, or history, or how people live. You want that in order to make your world a bigger place.”
Jeffers said she experienced a big jump in her German-speaking abilities over the course of her trip. She described being very nervous to speak German in a restaurant on the first day.
“I was like, I’m just gonna wait [to eat] until the dinner tonight,” Jeffers said. “By the end of the trip, I was way more confident with ordering stuff. I remember some lady asked me if I wanted something to go, and I understood it. And I was like, ‘Yes!’”
Jeffers also enjoyed the architecture and museums she visited and was emotionally moved by the group’s tour of Dachau, a World War II concentration camp.
“Being in an actual concentration camp where horrific stuff happened is so much different than learning about it in the classroom because [in the classroom] you kind of feel like you’re separated from it to a certain degree,” Jeffers said.
Gavin emphasized how trips abroad allow students to experience things firsthand that they couldn’t experience back home. Many students, Gavin said, had experiences that were “life changing.”
“I just want to broaden your horizons and have you understand that America is one country in this very big world – and that there’s a lot to learn,” Gavin said.
Beth Fialko Casey agrees. She teaches English and is leading the trip to London. Rather than focusing on language learning or history, students on the London trip will be experiencing the city’s theatre scene.
“I think worldly people are better people,” Fialko Casey said.
Fialko Casey hopes to see six or seven shows across the nine-day trip, with stops at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Old Vic and of course, musicals on London’s equivalent of Broadway, the West End. Students will also visit museums and galleries and go to high tea.
Fialko Casey says that she’s had “very little” difficulty with students on past trips.
“Burlington kids tend to be pretty sincere. They do make fools of themselves on their cell phones and they look distinctly American,” Fialko Casey said. “But our students have just always proven to be curious and adventurous and kind spirited, and so foreigners tend to forgive us a little bit.”
Jeffers said she felt like the students on her trip to Germany last year were not just “kind-spirited” adventurers, but also “like a little family.”
“It just felt like a little community, and not like I was with a bunch of random kids who I didn’t really know,” Jeffers said. “What made Germany so fun and so special is I genuinely feel like everybody on that trip was like this (Jeffers crossed her fingers).”
All 3 trips will take place during the YES program May 29 through June 10.
